The infrastructure of the Internet may be described in a simplified manner as a collection of computer systems (e.g., hardware and software) that are interconnected by public/private networks (e.g., transmission lines and routers) to enable the transfer of information among them, as illustrated in FIG. 1. The Internet infrastructure is an intricate, extremely rapidly growing mixture of complex and disparate hardware systems, networks, and applications. Maintaining knowledge of these components requires expertise (e.g., system administrators and information technology professionals) that is not easily acquired and often difficult to keep. In addition, much of a company's Internet infrastructure may often be running outside of the company's enterprise in that it is hosted at a third party data center or co-location facility.
The disadvantage of hosting a company's infrastructure at a data center is the overhead of trying to monitor, manage, and support that hosted infrastructure. Data centers may not provide any information on systems and services running from the switchport down. The result is that companies that host may have no critical view into what is actually happening on the infrastructure for which they have invested large amounts of money.
There are several point solutions attempting to remedy this problem. A point solution is a solution that attempts to address a problem from a particular, and often limited, vantage point. Some examples of point solutions include server monitoring software, network monitoring software, or an application monitoring service. None of these point solutions may be sufficient to reliably monitor a site. This may leave companies scrambling to pick and fit together a mixture of disparate, often overlapping, solutions, none of which span and scale to remedy the entire infrastructure hosting problem.
Many of these solutions also grow out of software companies that have little experience in the infrastructure hosting or Internet content creation industry. This may leave their products limited in scope and often burdens the hosting company with installing and managing additional software in their hosted environment. It also may create scaling problems for installing agents for every monitored aspect on every machine in a hosted environment.
Another solution to the infrastructure hosting problem is from a “lights out” point of view in that the solution attempts to “knock the lights out of” the problem in a quick, all encompassing fashion. Companies employing such a solution typically own the equipment, build the applications, monitor and manage the infrastructure, support the hardware and software, and run the hosted environment. These companies attempt to cover every aspect of the hosting environment and infrastructure support and management problem. Such attempts may significantly add to their cost of doing business. For example, monitoring of the infrastructure for a do-it-yourself company requires the installation of software agents on the host systems. As such, a company's resources may be consumed for storage, maintenance, and version progressions of such software. Additionally, applications used by these companies tend to be very code intensive and the operating system of the host systems may not be very reliable. Such platforms may not be very scalable or robust and, thus, may not be as desireable.
The overriding problem with these prior solutions is that they focus on attacking infrastructure problems, rather than proactively preventing them. Such reactive solutions are limited in their effectiveness in that they may not prevent the same problems from recurring and they may not prevent the occurrence of new problems.